☰

Test 4 Mrs. Miracle's Music Room

September 13, 2013

Five Favorite Pins of September

1 comment

Today, I'm trying my first linky party; I'm blogging about my five favorite pins this month! I love Pinterest...I think it's such a wonderful way to share ideas (especially teaching ideas!) Here are my five favorite pins for this month: #1: Bim Bum You Tube Video: Maybe these girls made this video to share with other kids their age, but they are doing such a service to music teachers, especially those who want to collect folk songs and teach through technology! I transcribed the music below (in a more comfortable key for singing with children): The song could be used for fa and tika-t…

Read more »
September 09, 2013

Four Ipad apps to help organize your classroom

5 comments

Are you looking for iPad apps to help organize your classroom? Here are four of my favorites! #1: Numbers This is one of the first apps that the Apple salesman suggested to me after I bought my Ipad. You can view it by clicking on the picture below: At $9.99, it is one of the pricier apps I've bought, but well worth it. It's a spreadsheet program, and although it's similar to Excel, it seems smoother and more powerful to me. I typed all of my students' names into class lists in Numbers, then added columns for singing solos and other assessments. Every time a class comes into the r…

Read more »
September 09, 2013

Music Manipulatives: Popsicle Sticks

1 comment

Manipulatives are one of my favorite things to use in the music classroom, so when I heard that Lindsay Jervis from Pursuit of Joyfulness was hosting a linky party about manipulatives, I thought I should contribute! I am writing today about using popsicle sticks for rhythm writing. After my first graders have reviewed the term "rhythm" and have worked with icons, and before they are working with the notation for ta and ti-ti, I have them work with "long" and "short-short,"  notated as ___ and _ _. This is a great intermediate step to getting them to hear 1 sound o…

Read more »
August 15, 2013

My music room set-up

4 comments

I have been so busy preparing my music classroom for the year, I thought I'd share some pictures of my room. I've added quite a few new things this year! Here are a couple pictures of my room: Here is one of my bulletin boards. This year, I'll be teaching flute, trumpet, trombone, and recorder, so I added the first fingerings for all of those. I have all of the sets in my TpT store (individual and bundled.) My other bulletin board will correspond with our school-wide theme "Wild World Tour." Each grade level is focusing on one continent for the year, and for their musical p…

Read more »
August 06, 2013

Creating and Implementing a SLO

5 comments

I know it's been a while since I wrote, but I've been busy preparing for the school year! I will be posting pics of my music room soon, but besides preparing my music room and music lessons, I also just finished taking a class about student learning objectives, or SLO's.  For those of you not in the state of Ohio, legislation was recently passed in which teacher evaluations will be based 50% on observation and 50% on the results of two SLO's. Student learning objectives are plans each teacher writes for a specific concept, estimating adequate yearly growth for each student. We …

Read more »
June 23, 2013

Grant Writing for the Music Classroom

2 comments

I've finished up the first week of teaching Kodaly Level I Pedagogy and Folk Song Research at DePaul University. It has been a great week full of lots of singing, playing, and reflective discussions! As we go onto the second week, I'm excited about the special topics classes taught by my colleagues. On Monday and Tuesday, my friend and colleague Donna Gallo will be presenting strategies for creating music with Garage Band. I just know that after this session I'm going to be wishing I had a classroom set of Ipads! I'm posting the information below about writing grants as a remin…

Read more »
June 11, 2013

Those darn squirrels!

2 comments

Okay, I know, it has been a while since I blogged! But if you're like me, you've been enjoying the warm weather and hopefully, your first few days off! I've also been preparing to teach Kodaly Level I at DePaul starting this upcoming Monday, and even though I've taught Level I several times, there is still so much work to do! Even with all that preparation, I've been enjoying some quality time with my daughters: Jenna, who is 9 years old, and Macy, who is 9 months old. I explained the other day to Jenna that their ages will never line up like that again...pretty special! A c…

Read more »
May 25, 2013

Creating criteria for evaluating performances

No comments

As we approach the end of the school year, I often look at my grade-level indicators at what I wasn't able to cover, or what I wish I had delved into more. It would be wonderful to say we could get to everything, but with music only twice a week for thirty-five minutes, that can be quite the difficult task! One of the benefits about being a music teacher is that unlike classroom teachers, if we need to slow our pace down when we realize that students need more practice, we can without having to worry about how it might impact standardized tests. If we don't get to every single concept…

Read more »
April 25, 2013

A new way of teaching notes on the treble clef staff

9 comments

Over the years, I've tried several different ways of teaching the notes on the treble clef staff. For a while, I used the silly sentences (like "Every Good Boy Does Fine" and "Elvis' Guitar Broke Down Friday" for the lines) and "FACE" for the spaces. Then one year I decided I'd show them that the treble clef is sometimes called the G clef because it crosses the G line four times. Then, they had to figure out that the next note was A, the note after that was B, etc. I thought maybe this was better than the silly sentences, but I quickly learned that al…

Read more »

Copyright © 2017 | Designed By Anke Templates